Over the past few years in Lancashire, we have increasingly investigated more metabolic issues on our sheep farms. These include growing lambs, especially during autumn and winter, and ewes around lambing time. We have been encouraging sheep farmers to screen the poorest lambs late in the grazing season and ewes pre-lambing to manage these preventable problems early, rather than having to intervene once clinical signs appear.
The main barrier is the additional cost of testing, but the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway funding has helped overcome this, in addition to the increased productivity of a flock not limited by nutritional imbalances. If you haven’t already signed up for the pathway, there is more than £1000 per group within the same flock available for a wide range of veterinary services, so I recommend you contact your vet about it! 
What can I spend this funding on, I hear you ask? I have included a few starting points that we encourage our sheep farmers to investigate, things that are generally not sampled until major issues occur, but we are trying to identify any potential problems before they have significant financial and welfare implications. Where possible, we try to apply the ‘prevention is better than intervention’ approach by identifying vaccinatable diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and implementing management strategies before the problem has occurred.
A large amount of our time is spent reacting to or giving advice on preventable problems, so working out the cost-benefit of ways to prevent these is important. I would suggest that Clostridial and Pasteurella and abortive vaccines are generally very cost-effective, as these are usually detrimental to the output of the flock by having a high mortality risk. The cost of boosting lambs with a Clostridial and Pasteurella vaccine will very quickly be justified if it saves
even one life. This same conversation should be had about every management change that is considered, but the indirect costs of many diseases or deficiencies are underestimated, and if they
are not looked for, they will hinder the farm’s output. As sheep farming profitability is often in small margins, these can add up to be costly factors in the health and productivity of your flock.
Growing Lambs
We ask the farmer to select a group of the poorest lambs, screen for endoparasites and test lambs from each group for energy, protein, copper, selenium, cobalt and iodine (other tests can be added if you are suspicious of other deficiencies). Cobalt and iodine have been the most common trace element deficiencies in our flocks, with many of the cobalt-deficient lambs having received mineral supplementation already in the form of drenches, boluses or injections. As cobalt is not stored, drenches are often insufficient to correct deficiencies and boluses or injections are a better option. Testing also allows more targeted supplementation, as many products are combinations of minerals and knowing which are deficient prevents oversupplementation of those that are at adequate levels.
Ewes
Winter is a time of transition for breeding ewes, with grass quality decreasing and pregnancy to deal with, it is an important time to monitor nutrition. In addition to body condition scoring when handling at tupping, scanning, and the run-up to lambing, screening ewes 3-4 weeks before lambing is a cost-effective way of minimising the risk of metabolic issues at lambing time. Sampling 10 or more from different groups of ewes (singles, multiples, gimmers, different breeds) will give an accurate insight into the nutrition status and allow adjustment of the ration, if required, to have its effect in time for lambing. Copper deficiency in late pregnancy causes swayback in lambs, and susceptibility to deficiency (Welsh Mountain, Cheviot) or toxicity (Texel, Suffolk) varies by breed. It is often ‘locked up’ by high molybdenum and sulphur, so testing forage and sampling the sheep will give us the best insight into whether supplementation is required.
We have found barren ewe screens to be another very useful group to test for trace elements (copper, selenium, cobalt, iodine), abortive (enzootic abortion, toxoplasmosis) and iceberg diseases (border disease, Johne’s, among others). This is another great use of Animal Health and Welfare Pathway funding to look for issues in the rest of the flock by sampling this highest-risk group.
Lambing KPIs
As we look ahead to lambing time, I emphasise the importance of record-keeping around lambing to our farmers. Recording key performance indicators (KPIs) such as scanning percentage, number of ewes to the tup, abortions, lamb mortality and respective ages, number of lambs weaned, can act as an early warning system to potential problems and compare yourself with other years or other farms. This benchmarking is something we have introduced with our Oakhill Sheep Discussion Group farms to create talking points of common problems and how to address them. The funding can help pay for your annual health plan, which is a nice time to discuss these KPIs with your vet to identify strengths and weaknesses compared to previous years or other local farms and create a plan for next year.
By Charlie Parker, Veterinary Surgeon, Oakhill Farm Vets